Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

In time, libertarian theories were introduced. Patients worked on a farm — until that was sold for development. The piggery lasted until 1973, when it was deemed to be no longer commercial. ‘Harmless’ inmates were taken, in a long crocodile, for walks into the local countryside. They went to Bedmond by way of East Lane, past the home farm and the burial ground. East Lane was thought to be relatively free of traffic. There was one obvious drawback to the continuance of that walk. Leavesden and Bedmond are on different sides of the M25. East Lane tunnels under the motorway.

More enlightened attitudes prevailed. Inspections identified mismanagement, the cruelties that are always found in closed systems. Smaller units replaced the huge wards. Old people were given some dignity by exchanges with younger children, in which they became surrogate grandparents. Names replaced numbers on the dormitories. The sexes were allowed a measure of free association. The number of patients fell.

Leavesden, in the Thatcherite Eighties, had to be put on a proper business footing. Management consultants arrived. The NHS was under pressure to realise its principal asset, land. New Labour redefined Tory asset-stripping as a kind of mysterious life-enhancing policy that was too complex, too sensitive, to be revealed to the voters. Victorian hulks didn’t belong in the green belt. Best Value. There were skirmishes over planning permission at Napsbury, but the directive stood: sell to the highest bidder. A measure of heritage would be retained, water towers, cricket pitches. Turn expediency into a boast: we will set the last inmates free. If there is no society, how can there be any social inadequates? Let them take up residence in Watford hostels.

But the citizens of the motorway corridor don’t like that word, hostel. Hostel hisses. Hostel suggests hospital, hospice. Dying rooms, cancer clubs. Hostel speaks of charity, pilgrims. Asylum seekers. Benefit scroungers. Watford, with its street of hostels, could become another Margate, another King’s Cross. Junkies without proper medication. Thieves. Bandits. Tarts. Gyppos. Loonies.

Foucault understands very well how a place that ‘was formerly a visible fortress of order has now become the castle of our conscience’. The fugue, the search for a site of redemption, can very easily turn into a counter-pilgrimage. Madmen find themselves confined alongside the holy relics which they have travelled so far to honour. When the shrine is converted into a ward, the mad traveller (according to Foucault’s interpretation) will be classified as just another ‘ritual exile’. He doesn’t belong to city or countryside: that is his curse and his privilege, to be always moving, to be at home nowhere and everywhere.

The sky was a miracle of pink, stippled over the early blue. Renchi was stocking-capped against the strong diagonals of the cloud streets. A placard on the hospital wall: DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITY/FOR SALE/ALL ENQUIRIES/WEATHERALL/GREENE & SMITH.

Glints from bowed windows, net curtains. The occasional electric milk float. Nothing else moving around the streets of Abbots Langley, as we make our way towards the conjunction of the River Gade and the Grand Union Canal. River systems nudging out from Chiltern chalk towards the Thames.

There is a residual strangeness in these aborted villages; settlements are unsettled, restless, dozing alongside the muffled millrace of the motorway. The original layout of streets, around the manor house and the church of St Lawrence, has been warped to accommodate hospital colonies, their farms, the Leavesden Aerodrome. The North Orbital Road drags everything towards the hungry M-numbers, M25 and Ml. Watford is ballast to the south.

Even the speculative builders are confused. Should they run up identical units, pebbledash kennels that grow in the night like serpents’ teeth? Or should they go for that post-Voysey, Arts and Crafts look? Gabled, mock-beamed, doors decorated with stained glass sunsets? Hedges, shrubs, evergreens. These avenues don’t smell like Hackney. Without the shops, fast food outlets, cigarette packets chucked out of can, cartons and wrappings and newspapers, claim forms and parking tickets, final demands and chewing gum, paving slabs are free of the soft, bright mulch of the city. They don’t rock when you put your weight on them. No sparkling puddles of glass punched out of bus stops, crystals from trashed windscreens. No vomit skids, no steaming canine excreta. Out here cars sit serenely on wide pavements, each in its own space — within meticulously observed demarcation lines. Gallows Hill Lane is like a funeral procession held at traffic lights that will never change.

One car is obviously a collector’s piece. It’s white, but nothing like the white of Renchi’s well-used vehicle. The white of aspiration, of burnt-out film frames. It would never make it around the tight spirals of a Watford multi-storey car park. It’s long and low and lean, with fins and exoskeletal ribs; fat, white-wall tyres, girder-sized bumpers, tinted windows, banks of rear lights like a Spielberg spaceship. Lefthand drive. The lightning-flash trim is supposed to suggest that, even parked on a pavement in a deadbeat suburb, this mother is flying. A gas-guzzling, highway-devouring passion wagon. Head-on, the blunt bonnet with its sharks’ fin decorations, chrome-nipples, pseudo propellers on front bumpers, predatory radiator grille, is pure bombast. The Detroit recipe: carved fat, metal on steroids. But this is nothing more than a trophy, going nowhere, wheels sunk into grooves on the pavement. An anachronistic art work with its nose pointing at a motorway it will never ride.

Access to the canal is easy, we’re on a footpath that will take us south, back to Denham; we’re walking a line that’s parallel with the M25 — but we’re separated by the soft tissue of golf courses, woods and fields. We might have been tempted, later in the day, to make a detour for Merlin’s Wood and Merlin’s Spring, but we prefer just now to push on, in the general direction of Watford and breakfast.

The canal path is perfectly pleasant, still water reflecting a brightening sky; a shaggy rim of winter trees, smoke climbing straight from the thin chimneys of moored narrow boats. The walk becomes a stroll. We’re never entirely comfortable about travelling through territory that is happy to have our company. (Blairite motto: Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory .)

The Grand Union Canal is no longer a commercial artery, working water. It’s deeper into its transformation than the Lee Valley Navigation. The spectre of quango-approved recreation, leisure lakes, hangs over us. We can smell bacon fizzing in the pan. A crisp morning with a taste of snow in the air.

The Gade ox-bows with the canal; if we’re given a choice, we take the river. In its day, the Grand Union was a wonder, eight canals connected in a network that linked Birmingham with Nottingham, Oxford and London. Wide locks were built to take seventy-ton barges.

The bridges are a feature. They’re numbered. We’re at 162 and climbing. The Earl of Essex, who graciously allowed the Grand Junction Canal Company to cut a navigation through his park, commissioned an ornamental stone bridge to ameliorate the vulgarity of the venture. By designing an elegantly minimalist structure, with stone balustrades, heraldic capstone, symmetrical foot tunnels, he turned the canal into a pond, Palladian whimsy, a Chatsworth or Stowe of the (future) motorway fringe.

Before we reach this minor architectural feature, there are lesser spans to negotiate, bridges that have been customised to come into line with the prevailing post-hippie ethos of the narrow boats. Woodsmoke and the herb. Bright flowers in painted mugs. Bicycles. They haven’t cycled off to fetch the milk, but they’ve fired the day’s first spliff. These psychedelic barges are Notting Hill squats, batik-draped tents, Hendrix hutches of thirty years ago, now migrated (in my cultural tectonic plate theory) ten or twelves miles along the canal to the west. The stretch of water, from Watford to Uxbridge, is a floating Ladbroke Grove, a flooded Westbourne Park Road. They leave their boots out on deck. They have cats and books and guitars. They turn the arches of the nearest bridge into a Westway; extravagant murals of crows, purple seas and a black ship of fools, I LIVE HERE scrawled in chalk over a scarlet beach.